Co-Management

While we view the client as the primary manager for our staff, giving them the actual tasks and priorities to work on, Twassistant takes a Co-Management role that increases the effectiveness of our clients’ management and encourages higher productivity. Our Co-Management takes place in three categories.

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

H. James Harrington

Twassistant allows all our clients the ability to set up daily measurement of their team member’s output with two Staff Performance Indicators (SPIs) that measure the 1) Quantity and 2) Quality of the output. For example, a team member that is responsible for customer data entry would be measured on the number of entries that they make per day, and the number of errors that the manager finds in a random sample of the data entered.

Benchmarking

Once the measurements have been established, we will transform those measurements into a standard benchmark, so that the team member will be rated on a 1-5 scale. An example of that would be assigning scores to a certain number of completed data entries per day. If they achieve 10 entries, their score is 1, or if they achieve 50 entries, their score is 5. Standardizing the measurements in this way allows you to compare the performance of your team member to other people on your team, or to compare their performance to all the team members we have working for us, giving you an accurate sense of whether their performance is meeting expectations.

Sets Expectations

One benefit of setting up the SPIs is that it creates clear expectations for your team. There is a crystal clear evaluation of their performance and they get instant feedback on whether or not they are hitting their targets. It’s especially important to think through your SPIs carefully because measuring the wrong things leads to the wrong results. We encourage setting two SPIs, one for Quality and one for Quantity. These are counter-balancing measurements that will help increase output without sacrificing quality.

Hourly Logs

In addition to the SPIs, staff are also required to log their hours each day, and provide a description of the work that they did. This information is then sent to the Twassistant management team each day and is accessible by the client online. This information can then be checked against the output of the staff member to encourage open communication about productivity and performance.

Our team is set up to provide all of the technical, educational, and relational support that your staff require. We can provide local phone numbers, email addresses, and other forms of communication. We can also recommend tools for chat, project management, video conferencing, and other use cases. When your staff run into technical problems, our IT team can help them diagnose at a high level, including secure encryption and communication techniques.

Twassistant also provides education, training, and coaching for our staff to support their roles with our clients. We have relationships with educational institutions that can provide on-demand training in almost any area, including web design, online marketing, executive assistance, project management, graphic design, Excel, Word, and more.

Given our cross-cultural context, strong relationships are a necessity for bottom-line results. To read more about how we encourage strong relationships, read our Client-Staff Relationships page.

Twassistant wants our clients to start having productive relationships with their staff without any hassle, so we take care of all the logistical issues of international staff and freelancers. We have established legal relationships with all of our staff and have systems in place for making payments to almost any country in the world.